A few more year end awards have been announced for both Fallout 3 and Bethesda Game Studios over the weekend.

Up first, GameSpy concluded their year end awards — with Fallout 3 taking home the award for Overall Game of the Year and winning the Gamers’ Choice awards for Xbox 360 and PC. It’s a great honor anytime we get awards like these — especially when it comes from fans.

On Friday night IGN announced their Best of 2008 awards for Xbox 360, with Fallout 3 taking awards for Best RPG, Best Use of Sound, and Game of the Year. Here’s an excerpt from what they had to say on the game winning GOTY:

“The sense of immersion in this twisted, yet somehow believable, world is fantastic, but it’s the freedom and memorable moments that put Fallout 3 on top. The VATS combat is fantastic. The role-playing and decision making is top notch. Just about everything Fallout 3 does is special. You could (and should) play Fallout 3 for dozens and dozens of hours and still turn it on the next day and find something new and exciting.”

With Christmas and New Year’s (and the always important Celebration of Gstaff Day) coming up, many of us are taking time off and celebrating the holiday season. Of course, that means many of us will get to spend some extended time playing games.

Chris Esko, Gameplay Programmer: Trying to finish all the games I haven’t had time for. Fallout 3, Left 4 Dead, Gears of War 2, Prince of Persia, Rock Band 2, Kings Bounty, and getting sucked back into WoW with the Lich King expansion.

…we’d want to do it just like this. A bunch of guys here at the office thought this video — “Shine on Me” by Chris Dane Owens — was awesome like we never knew awesome could be. If you like it, check out his site, which has a better quality version of the video.

This morning I got several emails from members of the team pointing out the trailer for a new Fallout 3 mod — Enclave Commander Mod. Here’s the basic decription for the mod, created by J3X:

“This mod adds a Enclave Radio Transmitter. When you use it it will call forth a Vertibird loaded with 3 friendly Enclave soldiers to your position. You can find the transmitter at the entrance desk in the Museum of History.”

Here’s some news/stuff I found around the web that you’d be interested in. To start off, I suppose I should explain the image above. A bunch of guys on the team forwarded me this image, originally posted in the Something Awful forums by Drinkfist. All I can say is…wow!

In news, Fallout 3 has received recognition in a few more “Best of 2008″ lists. AP writer Lou Kesten ranks Fallout 3 as the #1 game of 2008. Elsewhere, GameSpy and GamaSutra both announced the game as their top PC game this year. Here’s a excerpt from the latter:

“The sheer amount of content in Fallout 3 is extremely impressive, considering what a consistent level of quality it maintains — and how much of it a player is likely to completely miss, based on the choices made, the NPCs killed, the routes traveled, and any number of other variables.”

With the release of the G.E.C.K. last week, more sites are beginning to report on the modding scene for Fallout 3. We’ll be following the developments closely, but for now, you can check out some recommeded mods at UGO and MTV Multiplayer.

Finally, BGS forum member OblivionRulez let me know about a community contest held at the German Fallout fansite, Fallout-HQ. The contest had three categories — comics, wallpapers, and fan trailers. Currently, the winner of the fan trailer competition can be seen here at GameTrailers. Nice work!

UGO: Does all of the DLC take place in maps outside of the DC Wasteland? How will you handle long distance travel to, say, Pittsburgh?

Jeff Gardiner: While this is true for most of the DLC, they all have â€˜hooks’ in the main game. “Broken Steel” itself will largely alter the game world in spectacular ways, and as always through player decisions. To get to Pittsburgh, the player will have to find an abandoned railroad…

Today in both the UK and the US, an update (v1.10) for the PlayStation 3 version of Fallout 3 went live. The patch adds Trophy Support, fixes Friend Notification issues, and also fixes a number of other issues reported within the community. When you boot up the game, you should see a notification to download the 24MB update.

Again, the update is presently available only for the English PS3 version of the game in the US and UK. Updates for other PS3 territories, as well as Xbox 360 and PC versions of the game, are on their way — right now those are in the final stages of being approved. When we have more news, we’ll let you know.